Motherload: if we care so much about building strong families, why are we forcing single welfare moms to work full time?

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1992 by David Segal

Could a program that combined part-time work and generous earned income tax credits lift moms out of poverty? If New York State's Child Assistance Program (CAP) is any indication, the answer is yes. The scheme, operating in several counties since 1988, is among the rare welfare experiments in the country to acknowledge, in the words of New York State Department of Social Services Commissioner Mary Jo Bane, "that parenting obligations may preclude [a welfare mother] from working full time." While taxpayers get a sense that they're not subsidizing laziness, CAP children get a parent who can play with them, prevent them from overdosing on Ninja Turtle cartoons (or anything else), and explain why the sky is blue; in short, they get a mom.

CAP's chief innovation is shaving benefits by only 10 percent as a woman gets to the poverty line and then reducing them by two thirds after that. The checks continue until a family is at 150 percent of the poverty line--around $13,000--which, not coincidentally, is close to the national median income for a woman with two children and no husband. The program also received a federal waiver to eliminate another incentive-crushing relic of old welfare assumptions, the assets test, a rule that cuts off welfare to any family with accumulated equity. Putting some money in the bank lets CAP mothers cushion against job instability, which makes them less likely to return to welfare when they run up against temporary setbacks.

The program doesn't replace AFDC so much as provide a rational alternative to it: For CAP to make economic sense, a family needs to be making $350 a month. Though it offers little by way of job search assistance or training, CAP is a step in the right direction because the average recipient's work stint is 25 to 3 hours long. The theory is that once a woman gets set in a job she will win promotions and raises that will eventually bring in sufficient funds to get her off welfare. "We intentionally set up the algebra so that women can work part time," says one of CAP's architects, Bill Shapiro. "Thirty hours is the average week for mothers in the mainstream economy. Expecting a single mother to work 40 hours is not realistic."

The program's limited run has already yielded promising, if modest, results. Slightly over 3,000 people have enrolled in the program since it started; more than 800 of those have left the dole, a significant success rate in an area where triumphs are usually measured in single digits. Some 1,700 are still receiving benefits, but even these families are costing taxpayers less because benefit levels are lower in CAP. Less than 700 have gone back to AFDC.

Work fair

Work programs, especially ones that shoulder training and job search costs, are expensive. Most states have been unable or unwilling to put up enough money to retrieve all of their federal matching funds. Today, states are drawing down, on average, only 65 percent of what Washington has made available to them through the Family Support Act. A first step to "moving ahead" may be for legislators to put some money where their ardor is. While Michigan, for instance, makes more mothers with younger kids eligible for full-time work, it has ponied up for only 34 percent of its matching funds. New rules qualifying more women for entrance into underfunded programs is an easy sop to angry voters, but more money in training and education is what will get mothers working.